As demand for multicast services continues to grow, service providers continue to seek low-cost, bandwidth-efficient, and fault-resilient multicast transport capabilities for supporting the multicast services. In existing multicast transport networks, several different mechanisms are employed in an attempt to provide carrier-grade transport, at least some of which are based on the Ethernet technology known as Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineered (PBB-TE). These mechanisms attempt to upgrade commonly-used Ethernet technology to meet rigorous requirements of carrier-grade transport networks. More specifically, these mechanisms utilize independent spanning trees for each Virtual LAN (VLAN), where each VLAN spanning tree uniquely determines paths of the packets belonging to the VLANs. Disadvantageously, however, use of such mechanisms is inefficient and, thus, costly.